The terrorists also grievously injured one of the hostages.
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Fr. Hamel was killed Tuesday after two armed gunmen stormed a church in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray in Normandy during Mass. The assailants entered the church and took the celebrating priest and four others hostage.
“Only in this way can we win the war against terror”, he said.
“We can not allow ourselves to be dragged into the politics of Daesh (Islamic State), which wants to set the children of the same family against each other”, the Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal André Vingt-Trois, told journalists after the meeting at the Elysee presidential palace.
“France will always be France, because France will never yield and because France is always the bearer of ideals, values and principles, for which we are recognised throughout the world”, Mr Hollande said in a speech in the southwest town of Rivesaltes.
Now, it has emerged numerous most famous and recognisable places of Christian worship in Britain are working with police to foil an attack. “When we saw the knife in the right hand I said to myself, ‘well, something’s really going to happen there, ‘” she said.
They named him as Abdel Malik Petitjean, 19, who was killed by police in the attack along with Adel Kermiche, also 19, who had been awaiting trial on terror charges and had been fitted with an electronic tag despite calls from the prosecutor for him not to be released.
The prosecutor’s office said Wednesday the second attacker has not been formally identified. Police combing the area after the attack detained a 16-year-old whom Molins said was the younger brother of a young man who travelled to the Syria-Iraq zone of the Islamic State group carrying the ID of Kermiche.
The rector of the main Paris mosque, Dalil Boubakeur, said France’s Muslims must push for better training of Muslim clerics and urged that reforming French Muslim institutions be put on the agenda.
Those who knew him in this Normandy town where he grew up said Kermiche appeared to think of little else other than trying to join the extremist group in Syria after the January 2015 attacks on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket.
An 18-year-old neighbour said he had seen Kermiche just three days earlier in nearby Rouen wearing a long Islamic robe.
Candles were set in front of the town hall, and stunned townsfolk were calling for the kind of unity Hollande is seeking.
The French anti-terrorism coordinating agency, UCLAT, issued the photo of a man on July 22, warning police that the person – without a name but who turned out to be Petitjean – “could be ready to participate in an attack on national territory”.
Cazeneuve later told reporters that summer festivals that do not meet tight security standards will be cancelled, as the government assigned 23,500 police, soldiers and reservists to protect 56 major cultural and sports events.
“The global context in 2016 remains highly uncertain regarding the geopolitical and economic environment in which we operate”, the airline group said in a statement.
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Elaine Ganley in Paris contributed.
